DET 9, MIN 3: Third Out Eludes Gibson, Eades Debuts

Old Twins Cap · June 9, 2019

Gibson gets to two strikes and then nibbles, instead of attacking with a fastball/sinker down in the zone.

Good stuff but he's got to be aggressive when he's up in the count.

terrydactyls · June 9, 2019

Yesterday was Saturday, June 8 and it was the 63rd game of the year. The Twins are now 39% of the way through the season and have hit 121 home runs. Out of 59 years, the current team ranks 34th on the all-time list of Twins' home runs in one season and are on a pace to hit 311 home runs this season.

terrydactyls · June 9, 2019

Yes, because attending a religious ceremony at the park is obviously the same thing as leaving the stadium to go have a hotdog at a carnival.

Correlation is not causation. Your post says a whole lot about you and virtually nothing about Kyle Gibson.

Sorry but I disagree. A pre-game routine is called that for a reason and it's valid to question whether a change in the routine impacted the performance.

Tom Froemming · June 9, 2019

I believe xFIP is the strongest predictor of pitcher success. Here's how the rotation shakes out right now:

3.43 Gibson

4.14 Berrios

4.26 Odorizzi

4.47 Perez

4.76 Pineda

james2334 · June 9, 2019

I don't think it's time to panic on Gibson. Prior to this start he went 5 and gave up 1 run to Tampa and the start before that he went 7 and gave up 1 run to the White Sox. Yesterday he didn't have his best control and yet if he didn't hang a slider at a bad time his line would have looked a lot better. When Gibby's good he's really good and when he's bad he still gives the team a chance to win most days. I'm much more concerned with Martin Perez at this point.

lukeduke1980 · June 9, 2019

I don't think the pitching staff is in decline just being occasionally exposed when a game isn't 8-0 after 3 innings.

laloesch · June 9, 2019

Eades looks promising. Man i wish we could have signed keuchel to a one year deal instead of the braves.

USAFChief · June 9, 2019

Eades looks promising. Man i wish we could have signed keuchel to a one year deal instead of the braves.

Eades looks promising??

jmlease1 · June 9, 2019

Eades was...fine? did a few things well, you hope that maybe his control was down a bit from being over-amped in his MLB debut, and maybe he can be a useful middle inning guy.

Magill looks awful right now. I can't say I've ever been much of a fan, but I'm not enjoying being right about him. He's more combustable than Hildenberger was. Yuck.

I think Gibson will be fine; the peripherals look pretty good and it won't take much difference to get him back to performing like last season.

Don Walcott · June 9, 2019

Yes, because attending a religious ceremony at the park is obviously the same thing as leaving the stadium to go have a hotdog at a carnival.

Correlation is not causation. Your post says a whole lot about you and virtually nothing about Kyle Gibson.

Not sure what his post says about Thrylos. Other than him being a big Twins fan, I know virtually nothing about Thrylos, despite his having made over 10,000 posts (congrats, Thrylos).

Nor do I think it's appropriate to insinuate something bad from his comment. You can have an opinion that attending a religious service before the game didn't affect Gibson's performance without personal attacks. Or, maybe the tone of this site is changing to be more like other web sites where people attack each other for making non-PC comments. Won't that be fun.

Don Walcott · June 9, 2019

Has to be noted that Gibson did not follow his regular pre-start game preparation today and instead chose to attend pre-game religious services at the ballpark. How much that hurt the Twins is hard to tell.

Lots of things change the routines of players before games. And it's not just hard to tell, it's probably not possible to tell what effect that has on their performances.

Edited June 9, 2019 by Don Walcott

james2334 · June 9, 2019

I believe xFIP is the strongest predictor of pitcher success. Here's how the rotation shakes out right now:
3.43 Gibson
4.14 Berrios
4.26 Odorizzi
4.47 Perez
4.76 Pineda

Forgive me, I'm an old school fan that doesn't know much about xfip. I am curious, what does the xfip for a league average pitcher looks like?

AceWrigley · June 9, 2019

XFIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching, tries to eliminate the effects of defense on a pitcher's performance with a caveat on estimating HRs allowed vs Flyballs.

The American League average for xFIP right now is about 4.50, very close to the league ERA of 4.47. So xFIP and ERA are usually very close.

Gibson at 3.43 is 9th in the league with pitchers who have thrown a minimum of 40 innings (the starters). Gerrit Cole is the leader at 2.36, Blake Snell is 2nd at 2.66. Dan Straily of the Orioles is last at 7.15, ouch. In fact, Oriole pitchers hold 5 of the last 20 positions here. Maybe their fielders would like to wear helmuts out there.

As you can see in Tom's post above, only Pineda is higher than the league xFIP average. Odorizzi is an interesting case as his ERA is 1.96, but his xFIP is 4.26. If xFIP is predictive at all, second half results might not be as glorious as the first.

chpettit19 · June 9, 2019

I don't know if some people on here are just waiting for Twins pitchers to have a bad day so they can say "I told you he sucks! We're doomed!" or if they just ride an emotional rollercoast through the season where their feelings on the team and individual players (mostly pitchers these days) vary this dramatically from day to day. Gibson's last 3 starts (as an earlier poster mentioned) go 7 innings 1 earned, 5 innings 0 earned (1 unearned), 5 innings 5 earned. No he wasn't at his best yesterday (I don't think any of us have enough knowledge on what he did for his pregame preperation to say whether any possible change had anything to do with anything), but that's 1 game. His starts in May and his 2 so far in June have produced 39.2 innings with 16 earned runs. His first 3 starts of the year we subpar, but since then (9 starts) he has 6 starts where he has allowed 0,1, or 2 runs, 1 start giving up 3, 1 start with 4, and 1 with 5. If he's producing 2 out of 3 starts with giving up 2 or fewer runs I'll take it all year long and love it. The sky is not falling because of 1 rough outing. Let's all take a deep breath and relax.

As for the sky falling on Perez, I think that's a little aggressive, too. Was he going to maintain his Pedro Martinez type start? No, but let's not act like it's suddenly me standing on the mound out there.He's made 10 starts this year. He has 7 where he's allowed 2 or fewer earned runs. 1 start with 3 earned, 1 with 4, and 1 with 6. Let's have a little perspective here.

At some point Odo will probably have a rough couple starts too. Berrios will have some clunkers. We don't need to act like we need to blow up our minor league system to completely rehaul the team every time we lose a game, even if it's to a bad team. Those are still Major League hitters out there every night. The Marlins, Tigers, Orioles, etc. are all going to win games. And sometimes they'll put up a whole bunch of runs (Marlins dropped 16 on a playoff team earlier this week). The bullpen needs help, but lets not act like a week where the team doesn't win at a .670 pace means things have fallen apart. Just because our pitching staff doesn't run out a bunch of super expensive, big name guys doesn't mean we're automatically doomed.

ashbury · June 9, 2019

XFIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching, tries to eliminate the effects of defense on a pitcher's performance

I usually like advanced stats and can find a use for most, but IMO FIP (the X variety or otherwise) does not achieve its aim. There is nothing in FIP that, for example, depends on whether Buxton or Cave is in CF. Simply put, it doesn't eliminate defense, it eliminates from consideration the part of the game that makes it baseball and substitutes average performance in its place.

Much simpler for me is to look at OPS-against. League-wide, you can draw a rough comparison of OPS to the ERA that you could usually expect. Pineda for instance has an OPS-against of .809, and over the years that has worked out to an ERA somewhere a little north of 5.00. Not good, which we already know.

Gibson's OPS is .750, and ordinarily that should result in an ERA like 4.35.

Perez, .700, for an ERA equivalent around 3.75.

Berrios, .666, which I'd expect an ERA around 3.20 or so.

Odorizzi? Batters have a BA against him of .181 coming into this game, built on an unusually low BABIP of .243. The OPS is a minuscule .511, so low that I'm not even confident what ERA it translates to on a league-wide basis, but let's safely say it would be under 2.00. Which is where he is.

Really, all our starters are giving up runs about in line with the underlying hitting stats against them.

xFIP says that a certain percentage of flyballs go out, and Odorizzi hasn't given up his fair share so xFIP reflects skepticism. BABIP usually doesn't stay as low as .243, so there is another reason to expect more hits to fall in.

But he's leading the league in ERA right now. Simple "regression to mean" logic would point toward not keeping up the pace for the rest of the season. xFIP doesn't win any points from me for merely predicting that.

Meanwhile Jake has logged another very good 6 innings today. We keep expecting regression, but so far, he just keeps chugging along.

USAFChief · June 9, 2019

XFIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching, tries to eliminate the effects of defense on a pitcher's performance with a caveat on estimating HRs allowed vs Flyballs.

The American League average for xFIP right now is about 4.50, very close to the league ERA of 4.47. So xFIP and ERA are usually very close.

Gibson at 3.43 is 9th in the league with pitchers who have thrown a minimum of 40 innings (the starters). Gerrit Cole is the leader at 2.36, Blake Snell is 2nd at 2.66. Dan Straily of the Orioles is last at 7.15, ouch. In fact, Oriole pitchers hold 5 of the last 20 positions here. Maybe their fielders would like to wear helmuts out there.

As you can see in Tom's post above, only Pineda is higher than the league xFIP average. Odorizzi is an interesting case as his ERA is 1.96, but his xFIP is 4.26. If xFIP is predictive at all, second half results might not be as glorious as the first.

Actually, xFIP is "Expected Fielding Independent Pitching."

It substitutes projected HR rate for HRs allowed.

h2oface · June 9, 2019

I'm not sure, but I'd suspect that probably had about as much to do with his results as where he ate his breakfast this morning or which one of his shoes he tied first.

I am a believer in pre-game prep and consistency and ritual. I still see many greats practice one. Not so much a believer in the same socks or jock or hat, etc...... but the pregame prep probably did have a java script type of connection to his game day. I think it is about the ritual, not about what interupted it (as that seems to be what is ruffling peoples feathers and take on the initial comment). It is not the only thing, or even the main thing, but it is one thing.

Actors use ritual, musicians, orators, etc .......... it was just an observation, as I read it, that the pre-game ritual was interupted.

diehardtwinsfan · June 10, 2019

Has to be noted that Gibson did not follow his regular pre-start game preparation today and instead chose to attend pre-game religious services at the ballpark. How much that hurt the Twins is hard to tell.

So are you going to post this every time Gibson pitches? He pitched yesterday by the way... That's a Saturday. I did some checking on this. I couldn't find a whole lot online other than Gibson is involved with religious activities, but absolutely nothing that said he did anything yesterday... and strangely enough, morning religious activities tend to happen on Sundays (at least they do for the bulk of the Christian world, of which Gibson belongs). I found very little indicating what MLB does for religious players, whether that's a daily pre-game thing, weekly thing, post game thing, or whatever. Perhaps you saw something I didn't. I respect that. But show your work.

By the way, the game started at 4:10 ET. So whatever he may or may not have chosen to do at the park in his own time... probably had little to do with the results on the field as time was something he had plenty of yesterday. Given what I know about him, I know he's religious, but whether or not that disrupted his pre-game activities is rather dubious, especially without context... and I know you know that, but let's not pretend this is the first time your agenda has conveniently trumped any sort of real information... because we all know it's not, and that's especially true for players who are religious... for whatever reason. Again, show your work.

After all, if it happened at the park MLB sanctioned it and the Twins and Tigers also allowed it. I'm not sure how much this activity affected his pre-game, and if I was a betting man, I'd take out a second mortgage that says you don't know nearly enough of the specifics either... as your agenda on this subject has been pretty damn obvious for a few years now.

So if you want to play this game, show us if this is a daily thing. Show us how long these activities happen. Show us when these activities occur. Show us Gibson's attendance to said activities and correlate it to his starts. Show us what he needs to do in his pre-game routine and what he actually didn't get to do to attend said events.

Bottom line... Do your work.

Jham · June 10, 2019

If anything, it appears Gibby didn't pray hard enough...

He got the swings and misses. Got the k's. Some balls left the yard. Looked mostly fine to me.

ashbury · June 10, 2019

If anything, it appears Gibby didn't pray hard enough...

Moderator's note: Folks, in case Diehard's soliloquy didn't get the point across, may I remind you all that the site's Comment Policy is specific: "Please be mindful that comments relating to racial, cultural, religious, national, gender and sexual identity can be offensive, ditto locker room talk, even when there is no disrespectful intent."

laloesch · June 10, 2019

Eades looks promising??

Yes. I did say that.

Tomj14 · June 10, 2019

If anything, it appears Gibby didn't pray hard enough...

He got the swings and misses. Got the k's. Some balls left the yard. Looked mostly fine to me.

IMO, There are just some days were Gibson gets into trouble with pitch count and can't seem to shake it during that game. If Gibson throws 20+ pitches in the 1st it seems he pretty much does that every inning, and the other days if he has a lower pitch count he can sustain that. No numbers to back this up, but I told my son yesterday this is going to be a short start for Gibby because he is will probably end of throwing 20 pitches every inning.

Which is kind of weird since he is the best pitcher (I think 2nd best actually) at throwing first pitch strikes.You would think teams would be going up looking to hit that first pitch, but the days they don't he seems to nibble too much.

Mike Sixel · June 10, 2019

I usually like advanced stats and can find a use for most, but IMO FIP (the X variety or otherwise) does not achieve its aim. There is nothing in FIP that, for example, depends on whether Buxton or Cave is in CF. Simply put, it doesn't eliminate defense, it eliminates from consideration the part of the game that makes it baseball and substitutes average performance in its place.

Much simpler for me is to look at OPS-against. League-wide, you can draw a rough comparison of OPS to the ERA that you could usually expect. Pineda for instance has an OPS-against of .809, and over the years that has worked out to an ERA somewhere a little north of 5.00. Not good, which we already know.

Gibson's OPS is .750, and ordinarily that should result in an ERA like 4.35.

Perez, .700, for an ERA equivalent around 3.75.

Berrios, .666, which I'd expect an ERA around 3.20 or so.

Odorizzi? Batters have a BA against him of .181 coming into this game, built on an unusually low BABIP of .243. The OPS is a minuscule .511, so low that I'm not even confident what ERA it translates to on a league-wide basis, but let's safely say it would be under 2.00. Which is where he is.

Really, all our starters are giving up runs about in line with the underlying hitting stats against them.

xFIP says that a certain percentage of flyballs go out, and Odorizzi hasn't given up his fair share so xFIP reflects skepticism. BABIP usually doesn't stay as low as .243, so there is another reason to expect more hits to fall in.

But he's leading the league in ERA right now. Simple "regression to mean" logic would point toward not keeping up the pace for the rest of the season. xFIP doesn't win any points from me for merely predicting that.

Meanwhile Jake has logged another very good 6 innings today. We keep expecting regression, but so far, he just keeps chugging along.

Well, the data is clear. ERA has less correlation with future performance than FiP....

No one believes Odo will lead the league in ERA,I wouldn't think. This pitching staff has produced results that aren't likely to continue, given their underlying talent. I hope the FO acts on that knowledge.

Edited June 10, 2019 by Mike Sixel

ashbury · June 10, 2019

Well, the data is clear. ERA has less correlation with future performance than FiP....

How about OPS-against, though?

Mr. Brooks · June 10, 2019

How about OPS-against, though?

OPS against still relies on things outside of the pitchers control.

Balls that Buxton get too routinely are doubles against some centerfielders.

jorgenswest · June 10, 2019

How about OPS-against, though?

Slugging percentage which is a component of OPS stabilizes at around a full season for a starting pitcher (550 AB). Odorizzi is at 247 at bats. It might be something teams look to at the season’s end to suggest there has been a change on skill level (or not) as they make a free agency decision about Odorizzi.

At this point in the season the pitch level data is helpful and the Twins have much better data than we can see. I would guess that they also have some useful batted ball data. Of the traditional result data, strike out rate stabilizes earliest and it is encouraging that his strike out is up while his walk rate remains at career norms.

Sign In

DET 9, MIN 3: Third Out Eludes Gibson, Eades Debuts

Twins Video

Community Blogs

Forum Topics

Twins Top Prospects

The Players Project

User Feedback

Recommended Comments

Featured Comments

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Join the conversation